Study: Babies Understand Language Shifts

Just by reading grown-ups' faces, babies may notice when bilingual adults shift from one language to another, a new study shows.

The study, published in the journal Science, included 96 healthy,full-term babies aged 4 months, 6 months, and 8 months.

Some of the babies were from families that only spoke English. The otherbabies were from bilingual families that spoke English and French.

One by one, the babies sat on their parent's lap and watched a silent videotape play on a TV screen.

The video showed an adult reciting French and English sentences from aclassic book by Antoine de Saint-Exupery published in English as "The Little Prince" and as "Le Petit Prince" in French.

The researchers included neuroscience doctoral student Whitney Weikum ofCanada's University of British Columbia. They filmed the babies during theexperiment to see how long the babies watched the silent videos.

Across the board, babies aged 4 months and 6 months watched the videoslonger when the speakers switched languages, even though the speakers' wordscouldn't be heard.

The babies may have noticed how the grown-ups' faces changed in speakingdifferent words, note the researchers.

Among the 8-month-old babies, only those raised in bilingual homes keptpaying more attention to the language shifts. Those babies' bilingualupbringing may have reinforced their interest in telling the two languagesapart, the researchers suggest.

Weikum tells WebMD that she and her colleagues are interested to see ifthe findings hold for languages that have more rhythmic similarities thanEnglish and French.